Monday, January 22, 2018

More Cadfael mysteries … what to do, couldn’t resist the Cadfael world …



After I found the first Cadfael novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones, at Abids  in November last year (chronicled here) and started reading it, I found myself getting drawn into this medieval world of 12th century England.  I liked the novel a lot and wanted more.  I looked around and found more, but exercised restraint bought only the next three in the series from an online used books portal (chronicled here).  I finished reading the second too, One Corpse too Many. 

After I read the two Cadfael novels, I felt immense respect for the writer Ellis Peters (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter).  How carefully and cleverly she has created this world and put this Benedictine monk as a detective in this world.  She gives him a background that furnishes him with wide-ranging worldly experience and an array of skills.  He decides to take the cowl and become a monk when he is in his forties.  Shrewsbury becomes his area of operations and the Benedictine Abbey there his home thereafter.  It is a world where there is no electricity and no ‘technology,’ that is so much part of crime detective novels of this age.  But the medieval world had its own technology, and Cadfael is a master of that technology.  He knows his metals and weapons, chemicals, wood; he knows the human body; he knows about food and drink; his knowledge of medicinal herbs and concoctions comes from his days stationed in Jerusalem working in a herbarium.  And he is patient and observant, and since he entered the cloister at a much later age after experiencing a lot that the world had to offer, knowing humans and their weaknesses and strengths, he is much tolerant, far more lenient and even-tempered, unlike many senior monks who had entered the cloister as novices and had no idea of the outside world and its people.

I knew that there were more Cadfael novels out there on the same portal, and the prices seemed all right for me.  I let go off all restraint and bought ten of them, the rest of the lot on that portal actually.  This lot came in towards the end of December last year. 

Look at the covers of the Cadfael novels in this  edition ... each looks a set piece, nicely framed ... and the scroll at the bottom the picture ...
Look at the covers of this set ... similar, no?  I have only three in this set, but I checked most of the covers of other Cadfael mysteries in this set, and all have a prone body on the cover ... 

I had finished the second novel by the time this package arrived and the first thing I did was to read A Rare Benedictine, a set of three stories.  The first story, A Light in the Road to Woodstock, gives us Cadfael’s backstory, the last part where he decides to become a monk, putting an end to his career as a soldier.  This story also sets the historical and political background for the rest of the series, a period that is termed as ‘Anarchy’ in English history.  There are two other stories too, sort of Cadfael’s early ‘cases’ in Shrewsbury.  Ellis Peters wrote these stories ten years after the first Cadfael novel appeared, and after fifteen Cadfael novels.  There are references to people in and places of his pre-monastic life in these novels but no details.  Ellis Peters writes in her introduction to these stories that despite expectations she didn’t want to write a full-length novel about Cadfael’s past, but only that brief period of transition where soldier Cadfael becomes Brother Cadfael.    
 

After two blockbuster surprises where I got author signed copies of novels (Ian Rankin  and George Lamming), I now look very carefully at the second-hand books that I buy at Abids or receive by post.  There was a small surprise in this lot.  The erstwhile owner of this copy of St. Peter’s Fair, a Cadfael novel enthusiast and admirer of the author presumably, has carefully cut out a fairly lengthy obituary of the author (who passed away in 1995) from a newspaper and pasted it at the inside back page of the novel; ‘1995’ in pen is visible on the top. 


I have finished the third Cadfael novel, Monk’s Hood, and am now half-way through Saint Peter’s Fair, the fourth.

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